Medical Apps help Delhi surgeon operate with doctor in Texas

Live streaming medical Apps help doctors coordinate across the world

Imagine a doctor associated with Medicines sans Frontieres in a war zone in Afghanistan and working together with a surgeon in California to treat the victim of a rocket blast through live streaming. Doesn’t it sound incredible? Well, this is where medical science together with modern technology Apps such as Big Data and Analytics is headed for today.

Live streaming Apps such as MDLinking help doctors around the world share their best practices and treat patients on an international scale. The Apps combine live streaming with instant messaging and networking in a totally secure environment. Direct, double encrypted conversations between doctors can be made possible. The encryption ensures that the privacy of the interactions is maintained, even while the patient receives the best medical care and advice. Healthcare professionals who want to use the Apps are put through a tough credentials check before being admitted to the system.

“Confidentiality has to be an inalienable component of such Applications, otherwise the trust between a patient and a doctor can break down, leading to miscommunication or worse no communication at all. Though technology has brought about wide-ranging change in the world of medical science, one aspect that has not been properly addressed till now is confidentiality,” said Dhiren Singh, an official from MerlinMD, a Singapore-based healthcare provider.

Giving an indication of the unsafe modes of communication prevalent among medical professionals, a survey conducted by Deskera showed that 80 percent of doctors and nurses continue to use existing instant messaging services, despite privacy concerns.

Cloud-based Big Data Analytics

The Big Data Analytics element of the Apps provides access to an interactive educational library featuring live streams, training courses, large volumes of research and in-house point of view, virtual reality and augmented reality productions. These features allow doctors to conduct high-speed analysis, run through millions of research papers and genetic sequencing data, go through numerous treatment records throughout the world, getting deeper insights into how to treat a patient having a specific blood group, DNA sequence or characteristic. Doctors can benchmark patients against past occurrences, analyze how patients with specific genes respond to different treatments, and make decisions based on facts, not judgment.

“Big Data and Analytics provide doctors an immense opportunity to dig deep and come up with novel treatments that may have eluded them earlier,” said Shashank Dixit, CEO, Deskera, a Big Data Analytics firm.

Organizations such as MDLinking are building cross-linked networks across the world with a range of bodies, including medical colleges and non-profit healthcare establishments such as Partners in Health, the Aga Khan Development Network and Doctors Without Borders.

Bringing quality healthcare to the Third World

Billions of people around the world, particularly in the developing and underdeveloped world with low incomes, suffer due to lack of proper healthcare. India ranks 112 on World Health Organization’s list of global healthcare systems, with a large chunk of the Indian population outside the purview of health services. The collective medical knowledge could help in providing healthcare services to the over 5 billion people in low-income countries in Asia and Africa who have little access to healthcare. This technology is especially helpful in such settings by removing the effort and resources spent on transporting patients from one healthcare institution to another.

Medical professionals from Europe, Africa, Asia and the USA are signing up for such Apps, and the day may not be far when a patient in Honolulu can be operated upon by a team of surgeons spread over Sidney, California, and Cairo.

Muqbil Ahmar is the Editor of Run Your Business Site and Technology Evangelist. He is an avid blogger and a storyteller. With more than 10 years of experience in journalism, he looks at technology from the prism of society. Armed with an M.Phil in Science Policy Studies from JNU, he wants to bring about better understanding between technology and society to make the world a better place to live in.